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How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe
Free Press
May 2009
On Sale: May 12, 2009
304 pages
ISBN: 141659857X
EAN: 9781416598572
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
From award-winning Financial Times journalist Gillian
Tett, who enraged Wall Street leaders with her newsbreaking
warnings of a crisis more than a year ahead of the curve,
Fool's Gold tells the astonishing unknown story at
the heart of the 2008 meltdown. Drawing on exclusive
access to J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and a tightly bonded
team of bankers known on Wall Street as the "Morgan Mafia,"
as well as in-depth interviews with dozens of other key
players, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Tett
brings to life in gripping detail how the Morgan team's bold
ideas for a whole new kind of financial alchemy helped to
ignite a revolution in banking, and how that revolution
escalated wildly out of control. The deeply reported
and lively narrative takes readers behind the scenes, to the
inner sanctums of elite finance and to the secretive reaches
of what came to be known as the "shadow banking" world. The
story begins with the intense Morgan brainstorming session
in 1994 beside a pool in Boca Raton, where the team cooked
up a dazzling new idea for the exotic financial product
known as credit derivatives. That idea would rip around the
banking world, catapult Morgan to the top of the
turbocharged derivatives trade, and fuel an extraordinary
banking boom that seemed to have unleashed banks from
ages-old constraints of risk. But when the Morgan
team's derivatives dream collided with the housing boom, and
was perverted -- through hubris, delusion, and sheer greed
-- by titans of banking that included Citigroup, UBS,
Deutsche Bank, and the thundering herd at Merrill Lynch --
even as J.P. Morgan itself stayed well away from the risky
concoctions others were peddling -- catastrophe followed.
Tett's access to Dimon and the J.P. Morgan leaders who so
skillfully steered their bank away from the wild excesses of
others sheds invaluable light not only on the untold story
of how they engineered their bank's escape from carnage but
also on how possible it was for the larger banking world,
regulators, and rating agencies to have spotted, and heeded,
the terrible risks of a meltdown. A tale of blistering
brilliance and willfully blind ambition, Fool's Gold
is both a rare journey deep inside the arcane and wildly
competitive world of high finance and a vital contribution
to understanding how the worst economic crisis since the
Great Depression was perpetrated.
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